The Dragon Age Website announces the Dragon Age II Signature Edition, an upgraded version of EA's upcoming RPG sequel being offered as a free incentive for preorders. Word is: "Dragon Age II announces the Dragon Age II Signature Edition. Pre-order Dragon Age II before January 11, 2011 and receive an automatic upgrade to the BioWare Signature Edition — a special, collector’s edition version of the game that contains loads of additional content, exclusives, and other perks. Pre-order now!"

This is being pushed by EA who feel so sorry for all the console players who thought the first one was way too difficult, and so Bioware has to make it far easier and far more mainstream.

I don't see anything to suggest EA is doing anything of the sort, just seems like convenient scapegoat scenario. People don't want to think that Bioware themselves could be responsible for this and yet look at the "streamlining" of Mass Effect 2 which was all Bioware. I doubt that's even what console players care about in the first place. Where are you inferring this from? All I remember seeing console players bitch about was the port quality itself and some of them felt conned into buying it based on highly misleading marketing. It was still a successful game that reviewed fairly well on consoles and is generally thought of positively.

Regardless, overhauling the combat system isn't even what people are terribly concerned with as it could have standed for improvement anyways. Everything else seems to be suffering too and I doubt it has anything to do with console users, especially considering people from the dev team commented on how they were jealous of Mass Effect's gameplay and wanted to recreate that "experience".

It could be Bioware, sure. Even so, the Bioware of old, who made BG, wouldn't have given a shit about combat being too difficult. As to where I'm inferring it from, do you remember the horde of threads about how difficult the game was just after it came out? And the three patches that nerfed the difficulty ever single time. The majority of those were the console version owners who were complaining.

And if it was the PC guys who were complaining, Bio/EA wouldn't change it. But the majority got sold on console, ergo, if they find it too difficult, let's nerf it and make the next one easier.

But eh, everything we're saying here is conjecture anyways.

I love ME2, so I'm not that worried about the streamlining of certain things. I missed the Mako (the Hammerhead is better), and I'm not happy about inventory just vanishing, but I think that in most other areas, ME2 is a better game than ME1. (apart from the story, but it's hard to make the second one just as epic as the first one, storywise.)